1. Discovery & Strategy
Know where the money should go before you spend it.
Most wasted marketing budget isn't spent badly. It's spent on the right tactic for a different business.
Who This Is For
Start here if any of this sounds familiar:
- You're spending on marketing and can't say which part is working
- Every agency you talk to recommends the exact service they happen to sell
- You're about to launch, expand, or enter a market you don't know
- You have a budget and no framework for splitting it
- Something used to work and quietly stopped
What's Included
What the engagement covers
Where you actually stand
An audit of your current position — website, search visibility, listings, reviews, live campaigns, and the analytics you already have. Most of the answer is usually in data you're already collecting and nobody has read.
Who you're competing with
Not a list of names. What they rank for, what they spend on, where they're strong, and the gaps they've left. The gaps are the useful part.
Who your buyers are
Built from your own customers, your sales conversations, and search behavior — not invented personas with stock photos and made-up names.
How they decide
The path from first awareness to signed customer, with the specific point where you're losing people. That point is rarely where owners assume it is.
Positioning and messaging
What you say, to whom, and why it's credible coming from you.
Channel plan and budget
Which channels, in what order, at what spend, and what each is supposed to produce. Including the channels we recommend you skip and the reasoning.
KPIs and measurement
The numbers that define success, where each is tracked, and what to do when one moves the wrong way.
The tracking audit
Every engagement includes a check on whether your conversions are actually being measured — calls, forms, bookings, and revenue where the systems allow it. This is unglamorous and it is the single most common thing we find broken. A plan measured against broken tracking is a plan you can't evaluate.
How Engagements Work
How strategy engagements are structured
Most are scoped as a fixed-fee project rather than billed hourly, so you know what you're committing to before you start. Scope depends on how many channels are in play, how many locations you run, and how much of your existing data is usable.
Consulting outside a project engagement is billed hourly, with a standing discount for retainer clients.
The plan is yours either way
You can take the strategy and execute it in-house, hand it to another agency, or hire us to run it. It's a document you own, not a pitch with a hook in it. We'd obviously like the execution work — but a plan written to make itself necessary isn't a plan, it's a sales tool.
Objections
Straight answers
Why pay for a plan instead of just doing the work?
Because execution without a plan is how businesses end up with six channels running, none of them measured, and no way to decide what to cut. If you already know what to do and just need it done, skip this and hire us for the channel. That's a real answer, not modesty.
Can't I get this free from an agency pitch?
You can get a version of it, and it will recommend the service that agency sells. That's not dishonesty, it's incentive. Paying for the strategy separately is what buys you the recommendation to spend less, or elsewhere, or not at all.
How is this different from your free consultation?
The free call is thirty minutes and gives you our read on your situation. The engagement is weeks of audit, research, and analysis producing a document you can act on. One is a conversation. The other is work.
Faq
Questions we get
How long does it take?
Two to four weeks for most SMB engagements. Longer where there are multiple locations or years of messy data to reconstruct.
What do I get at the end?
A written strategy document and a working session to walk through it. Positioning, audiences, channel plan, budget allocation, KPIs, and a sequenced roadmap.
What do you need from me?
Access to your analytics, ad accounts, and website, plus a couple of hours of interviews. If you have sales data or a customer list, that's the most valuable thing you can hand us.
Do you do this for businesses outside Chicago?
Yes. Most of our consulting clients are in Chicago and the surrounding metro, but strategy work doesn't require proximity — most of it happens on calls and in your data.
What if the plan says my business has a product problem, not a marketing problem?
Then it says that. It happens, and hearing it early is worth considerably more than the fee.
Start with thirty minutes.
Tell us what you're spending and what you're getting. You'll get our honest read on whether a strategy engagement is what you need, or whether you should just fix one thing and move on.